As a company that makes a lot of acquisitions, it’s only natural that Google loses some talent now and then – like Chad Hurley of YouTube and Omar Hamoui of AdMob, both of who have just said they’re leaving.
But rock-star developers are another matter – particularly when they quit to join arch-rival Facebook.
The prominent place that Lars Rasmussen (pictured) held in the Google ranks was evident from the star billing he was given at the company’s developer conference last year. The lead engineer on Google Maps, Ramussen had come up with one of the company’s most ambitious new services in the shape of Wave.
When we spoke to him soon after the launch of Wave, he admitted to some mistakes – in particular, creating an almost anarchic environment that many users found off-putting. But the fixes he attempted were not enough.
It looks like Ray Ozzie at Microsoft – whose own retirement was just announced – was right about Wave all along. In Ozzie’s view, it just wasn’t built for the Web, which favours simple component technologies that can be built into many different services, not big, complex designs like Wave.
Big risks sometimes produce big flops, but that is not a career-killer in Silicon Valley, where the biggest crime is not to have risked enough. Rasmussen is now on his way to Facebook, which has confirmed the move only indirectly with a rather arch statement to the effect that it does not “comment on potential employees until they start.”
The Hurley and Hamoui departures from Google are less surprising.
Hamoui was spotted recently looking very much at home at one of Silicon Valley’s better-known venture capital firms – no doubt busy hatching his next start-up idea. After his success with mobile advertising, his next venture is likely to be closely watched.
With Hurley, meanwhile, the surprise is that he’s stayed at Google this long – as he admitted himself in a conversation we had several months ago. It is four years since the $1.65bn acquisition of YouTube, and two since he started to step back as head of the video site with the appointment of Google executive Salar Kamangar. Hurley is still in no rush to move on, saying he will continue to work as an adviser to YouTube – though, like Hamoui, he has also been busy trying to figure out what to do for an Act Two.
